Follow the instructions, log in, authorize the app to access your data, and you'll be able to select a Visualforce Page to 'cast' to your TV.

One new feature here - if you select a Visualforce Page that uses a standard controller, and is thus expecting a record ID as a parameter, you'll get the opportunity to select a record. For simplicity, I'm just showing the first 10 records returned by the database.

Choose a record, hit send, and you'll see the page displayed by the Chromecast, in this case, it's a Mini Hack we ran a couple of Dreamforces ago:

Last time, I described how I ran a simple 'Hello World' application, served from a Force.com Site, on the Google Chromecast, a $35 digital media player. In this blog entry, I'll show you how to show any Visualforce page, not just a public page on a Force.com Site, on the Chromecast.

A quick recap... (Skip this paragraph if you've already read the previous entry). Chromecast is actually a tiny wifi-enabled Linux computer, running the Chrome browser, connected to a TV or monitor via HDMI. A 'receiver' app, written in HTML5, runs on the device, which has no input capability (mouse/keyboard), while a 'sender' app runs on a 'second screen' such as a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, the two apps communicating across the local wifi network via a message bus. The sender app typically allows the user to navigate content and control the media stream shown on the Chromecast (the 'first screen'). The CastHelloText-chrome sample allows the user to type a message in the sender app on the first screen, and displays it on the second screen via the receiver app.

Given a working sample, the next question was, how to access data from the receiver app? The core problem is that the Chromecast can only load a public web page - it can't login to Force.com. The sender app runs on a desktop browser, smartphone or tablet, however, so perhaps it would be possible to login there, and send a session ID to the receiver app via the message bus? I worked through a few alternatives before I hit on the optimal solution:

Sounds perfect! The only problem is that the session ID you pass to frontdoor.jsp must come from one of:

The access_token from an OAuth authentication (obtained with 'web' or 'full' scope)

The LoginResult returned from a SOAP API login() call

The Apex UserInfo.getSessionId()

The session ID from a Visualforce page or controller isn't going to cut it here. So, I reached for Kevin O'Hara's excellent nforce and built a quick Node.js sender app that has the user authorize API access via OAuth (including web scope!), runs a query for the list of Visualforce Pages in the org and presents them as a drop-down list. You can choose a Visualforce Page, hit 'Send', and the sender app constructs the frontdoor URL with the OAuth access token and relative URL for the page and sends it to the receiver via the message bus.

Note that, while you can indeed send any Visualforce page to the Chromecast for display, remember that the Chromecast doesn't have any capacity for user input, so tables and charts work best.

I tried a couple of approaches for the receiver app; first I simply redirected to the frontdoor URL, but then I realized that it would be more useful to load the frontdoor URL into a full-page iframe. That way, the receiver app could stay running in the 'top' document, ready to receive a different URL, and periodically reloading the iframe so that the session doesn't time out. Here it is in action:

All of the code is in my CastDemo project on GitHub. Feel free to fork it, extend it, and let me know in the comments how it works out.

When it came down to the code, this was a very straightforward integration; the vast majority of the work was thinking around the problem of how to have a device with no input capability authenticate and load a Visualforce page. Now that Frontdoor.jsp is documented and supported, it's an essential tool for the advanced Force.com developer.

POSTSCRIPT: Almost as soon as I hit 'publish' on this post, I realized I could push the app to Heroku, and allow anyone with a Chromecast and API access to Salesforce to see their Visualforce Pages on TV. Read the next installment here.

About a month ago, Google released the Google Cast SDK, allowing developers to create apps that run on the Chromecast, a $35 digital media player. The primary use case of Chromecast is to stream media - movies, TV shows, music and the like - via wifi to your HDMI TV/monitor, but, looking at the SDK docs, it became apparent that the Chromecast is actually a miniature ('system-on-chip') computer running Chrome OS (a Linux variant) and the Chrome browser. If it's running a browser, I wondered, could it load Visualforce pages from Salesforce and display, for example, a chart based on live data? If so, this would allow any HDMI-capable TV or monitor to be used as a dashboard at very low cost. When I was given a Chromecast by a colleague (thanks, Sandeep!) in return for alpha testing his app, I decided to find out!

This first blog post explains how I ran a simple 'Hello World' sample on the Chromecast, loading the app from Visualforce. Next time, I'll show you how I pulled data from Salesforce via the REST API and showed it as a chart.

Chromecast setup was pretty straightforward - a matter of connecting the device to an HDMI input on my TV and a USB power source, downloading and running the Chromecast app, and following the prompts to complete setup. The Chromecast app locates the device on the local network using the DIAL protocol. Note that, since the app is communicating directly with the device, it won't work on wifi networks that enforce AP/Client Isolation (many offices and hotels).

After installing the Cast Extension for Chrome and verifying that the Chromecast could display content from YouTube, it was time to put the device into development mode! This actually proved to be pretty tricky - you need to enter the Chromecast's serial number into the Google Cast SDK Developer Console. Sounds straightforward, but the serial number is laser etched into the Chromecast's black plastic case in very small type indeed. I entered it incorrectly the first time round, and had to take a photo of the serial number and zoom in to see that the last character was an S and not an 8!

Another gotcha I encountered is that it's necessary to go into the Chromecast settings (in the Chromecast app) and enable Send this Chromecast's serial number when checking for updates. This information is on a separate page from the device registration instructions, so it's easy to miss.

Now my Chromecast showed up in the developer console, it was time to get an app running. Since the Chromecast has no input devices (keyboard, mouse, etc), a 'receiver app' running in an HTML5 page on the device is controlled by a 'sender app' running on a 'second screen' such as a laptop, smartphone or tablet. The two apps are connected over the local network by a message bus exposed by the Google Cast SDK.

Looking through the samples, CastHelloText-chrome looked like the simplest example of a custom receiver. In the sample, the sender app, running on an HTML5 page in Chrome, allows you to enter a message ('Hello World' is traditional!) and sends it on the bus. The receiver app displays the message, and reflects it back to the sender, to demonstrate the bidrectional nature of the bus.

It was straightforward to convert the vanilla HTML pages to Visualforce - the first change was to wrap the entire page in an tag and remove the DOCTYPE, since Visualforce will supply this when it renders the page.

Adding the Visualforce pages to a Force.com Site made them public on the web. This is important - the Chromecast can only load public web pages - it has no way of authenticating to a server. You'll find out in the next blog post how I was able to access the Force.com REST API to securely retrieve content.

Once I had a pair of public pages, I registered my sample app, entering the public URLs for my Visualforce pages, and pasted the resulting app ID into the chromehellotext page. Loading that page gave me a text control into which I could type a message. Hitting return to submit the message pops up the Cast device selector.

I selected my device from the list, and - 'BAM!' - my message popped up on the TV screen - success!

One very nice feature of the Chromecast is that it allows remote debugging in Chrome. You can find the device's IP address in the Chromecast app, say 192.168.1.123, and simply go to port 9222 at that address, in my example, http://192.168.1.123:9222/.

You get the usual Chrome developer tools, right down to the ability to set breakpoints and inspect variables in JavaScript - marvelous!

I've published the sample app, so you can try it out yourself. If you have a Chromecast, go to my sender app page; you should be able to connect to your device and send a message.

At this point, I had to do some thinking. The Chromecast, as I mentioned before, loads a page from a public web server. How could I show data on the page, preferably without making the data itself publicly available? Read on to the next post!

Getting Started with the Force.com REST API - developer.force.com - This tutorial shows the basics of using the Force.com REST API. It walks through a simple Java Web application that authenticates the user to Force.com via OAuth 2.0, then creates, reads, updates, and deletes Force.com Account records via the new API. Note: As of Winter ’11 the Force.com REST API is still in Developer Preview and should not be used for production until its GA in a future release.